Private Equity Firms’ Behaviours in Western Europe : Does Country Matter?

Using a unique dataset of private equity firms (PEFs), this paper analyses the investment behaviour of private equity fund managers. This paper uses a multi-country sample of PEFs to compare the approaches to investee valuation, contractual agreements and financial tools in Europe. Univariate analyses describe practices of PEFs and multivariate analyses identify groups of homogeneous countries i.e. countries where PEFs' behaviours are similar. The comparison of these groups with traditional classifications based on legal regimes does not perform very well. This result can illustrate either the limits of the classification of countries based on legal regimes or the increasing integration of the most developed European countries that makes practices of financial actors converge across European countries